“India’s Deepest Divide Isn’t Rich vs Poor, It’s How Delhi Abandoned The East”, Forpolindia, October 12, 2025
“India’s public conversation likes to frame inequality as a question of class, the rich rising, the poor left behind. But the country’s deepest fracture runs not between high and low incomes, but between two geographies. Western India has been built for ascent. Eastern India has been left to endure. This is not a historical accident. It is the product of three decades of policy preference emanating from one capital: Delhi.
Kolkata is the clearest testament. Once the centre of colonial finance and nationalist thought, it housed the subcontinent’s first banks, stock exchanges, universities and literary circles. Yet today, the city stands stranded between its past and a future denied to it. Its ports are underused, its factories dismantled, its youth outbound. Kolkata did not collapse because it ran out of intellect. It collapsed because the nation withdrew investment.
Delhi Built India on Half a Map
When liberalisation began in the 1990s, capital and infrastructure were mobilised to create a new economic India. But the map was drawn narrowly. The western corridor, from Delhi to Mumbai, Pune to Ahmedabad, became the axis of ambition. Further south, Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad were equipped to receive technology and capital. Eastern India was treated as a logistical hinterland, not an economic frontier……..”
Read full article at forpolindia.com
